>Joyce's work could have been replicated by a single contaminating>bacterium. If it takes his supermolecule 5 minutes to cleave DNA, and they>are in fact random cleavages, how is that going to contribute anything to>the origin of life.

I would respond with 2 things: First, the bacteria has had 3.5 billion years
of selection to look for a better solution than Joyce was able to find in 2
years. Second, this is a property that ribozymes don't have in nature as I
understand the situation. Joyce wanted to evolve an ability that didn't
exist in nature.
So I am not surprised that better solutions can be found. The point is that
functionality is spread far more widely throughout sequence space than
Christians teach.

I would look maybe for a molecule that had the ability>to put DNA together, not cut it apart, and put it together in such a way>that the sequence had meaning in terms of protein. Then you have a>significant molecule. Lots and lots of non biological chemical reagents>have the ability to cleave DNA a lot faster than Joyce's molecule, and a>lot more specifically as well. In fact the whole Maxim-Gilbert method of>sequencing DNA by chopping it at specific base pairs is based on this>effect. Joyce is still in the dark ages. But lest you be tempted to>suggest that the chemical process is more evidence of ease of developing>molecules with specificity, I would (needlessly) remind you that they are>just helping things go downhill faster. What we need is a way to get>things to go the other way by a mechanism that will at the same time impart>specific information content to the molecules. Now that we don't have. Yet.

But Art, you miss the whole point of the example. I am not trying to prove
that life originated from molecules (although this has implications in that
regard). I do not have the ability to put together a origin of life
scenario. I am trying to show that the classic probability argument that
Christians put forth is very flawed. The standard arguments makes two
erroneous assumptions:

First they assume that a molecule either works or doesn't work, on or off, 0
or 1. But functionality is not the simple. Some work, albeit slowly, other
work rapidly.

Secondly they asume generally that only one sequence will work. Both of
these assumptions are wrong.